ABOUT THE ARTIST

Versia Harris is a Barbadian artist living and working in Weston, St. James, Barbados. In 2012, she graduated with a BFA in Studio Art from the Barbados Community College, with an award from the Lesley’s Legacy Foundation. She has since participated in four residencies regionally and internationally. Versia’s work was featured in the Fifth Moscow International Biennial for Young Art and as part of “MOMENTUM_InsideOut” in Berlin. Her animation ‘They Say You Can Dream a Thing More Than Once’ was awarded Best New Media Film at the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, 2014.

ARTIST Statement

Fantasy is defined as unrealistic mental images on which one repeatedly dwells, that reflects one’s conscious or unconscious desires. These images do not always stay as thoughts in the mind but often manifest into physical objects/pictures, actions, words or behaviours. Through a series of animations and still images, I think about how fantasy can manifest and how the reality of an individual may be pushed or bent, ‘This Quagmire’ is built on the mysterious, the unclear, and undefined world of fantasy and the act of daydreaming.

They Say You Can Dream A Thing More Than Once, State 3 - Video installation

This work is the third re-configurative installation of the animation “They Say You Can Dream A Thing More Than Once.” The animation follows a swan headed character through the landscape and generates a comparison between Walt Disney iconography and the character’s reality. She is a manifestation of a person both beautiful and flawed aspiring to acquire the perceived superior physical and behavioural attributes of the Walt Disney Princess.

Two unsynchronized projections of the video pass through seven layers of fabric, from the left and right, meeting faintly in the center.

Merely A Chimera

A chimera is a single organism made up of genetically disparate cells, making it possible for the organism to have two opposing bodily features. It can also be defined as a thing wished for but is impossible to achieve. This series documents a creature taking the various shapes of things observed in a continuous search for the ultimate identity.

Parataxic Distortion

The tendency of an individual to view a given situation through the skewed or tainted lens of past experiences or fantasy is in psychiatry called Parataxic Distortion. This series illustrates an individual’s helplessness to this condition and suggests that all encounters with any given situations will always be constructed and distorted. Seeing the reality of a thing is impossible.